Questions & Answers

How To Prevent And Treat Migraines

Migraine headaches, what a pain in the neck. Actually a pain in the head, aren’t they? Do you know anybody with a migraine? They’re bad. I used to get headaches so bad it was shocking, and I discovered it was my glasses were wrong. I had the wrong prescription on for a while there. But I’ve had a few headaches over the years that were truly spectacular, so I can really understand what it’s like to have a very, very bad headache. It’s terrible.

So, there are several types of headaches. The most common one by far is a tension headache, and it’s generally caused by emotional stress, muscular tension. Facial muscles, neck muscles, trapezius, different muscles. If you’re a guy or lady watching this now and you get a lot of headaches, when you’re in my room, the first thing I do is I just come up behind you and I just gently try and probe around different stress points, where I know they are. I can guarantee you’ll probably go, “Ah, oh, don’t touch that. It’s so sore. Why is it so sore?” It’s because it’s what we call it trigger point. Now a trigger point is where a muscle begins or ends, but we call it medically the origin or the insertion of that muscle.

So often, if you open up a chicken or do any cutting up of meat or stuff that I’ve done, you will know that muscles have got connective tissue where they’re held on different points. So if you look at those points in humans and you understand anatomy and physiology, you’ll soon work out where the trigger points are. When you push them, and if the person jumps through the roof, the first thing I’m going to look at with that guy or that lady is to try and understand where the stresses in their life are coming from. All right? Is it their son? Is it their daughter? Is it their neighbor? He said their mother-in-law? Is it Donald Trump? Is it Putin? What the hell is it? Try and find out where the stress is coming from. Is it occupational? Have they got a bad marriage? Is the wife playing up? Is the husband seeing another man? I mean, goodness knows everybody’s got problems.

So this is my PMF, my primary motivating factor in my clinic, is to look for the etiology. Or what we call in medicine the etiology, which is the cause in normal English. All right? So migraines are different. Migraines are not normal headaches. All right? Migraines are created basically by a reaction in a blood vessel. So the blood vessel will basically initially constrict and then expand. So there are some chemicals, for example, we call vasoactive amines, and these are found in various foods, which can be a common trigger for migraine.

Migraines aren’t that common as you think. Many people I’ve seen who get headaches say, “Oh my God, I got a migraine. Oh my God.” It’s actually not a migraine. It’s a tension headache. Okay? Migraine headaches lay you out. All right? That’s like someone getting a little smack around the cheek, or somebody getting KO’ed, getting knocked out. Okay? They’re knocked out is the migraine, and the slap around the cheek, that’s the tension headache. The difference with pain with the tension headache and migraine is seriously different. A migraine headache can be so bad. I had one patient who actually took his own life because he couldn’t live anymore with the pain. It was one of the most horrible cases I had to deal with emotionally because no matter what I did with this guy, I couldn’t help him with these headaches and I felt powerless. It’s difficult as a practitioner when you’re in that position, when you want to help people.

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But with your migraine, I can tell you now about 50% of migraines are food-related. 50%. Almost half. When I was practicing, actually when I was studying, I studied alongside a lot of people. There was a guy there that did a thesis, a proper long-term research project on migraine patients. He advertised in the paper, he got about 100 people in, and I sort of looked at a lot of the data. This is before computers, when we had all this data, analytics and stuff. We didn’t have that back then. Okay? We had actually pens and brains. We used to think about things and write things down. We didn’t have to let computers do the thinking. So we worked out that almost half of the people out of those 100, it was a food-related issue. All right?

So common food triggers. What are some of the common food triggers for migraines? They can be chocolate, tomatoes. It can be a whole bunch of different things. So yeah, you need to really work deeper into this, and maybe see somebody about this condition and have a good look. My website’s not quite up and running yet, but I’ll have a page on migraine on my site. Which I have, but it’s down at the moment because we’re redoing it. You need to look first at all the common triggers like gluten, and milk, and peanuts, and soy. So these are common things you need to take out. If you’ve got migraines regularly and you’re a female, I would ask you to probably have a good look and document them to see if they’re related to your menstrual cycle, because sometimes estrogen can push you into a migraine state.

So I would like you to work out when you get them, how often you get them, and how bad do you get them. So, okay? It’s the regularity of them, it’s the duration of length you get them, and it’s how bad the pain is. Those sorts of things I look at. But remember, I’m trying to find, in my mind, the cause of your migraine all the time. Trying to think, “Why did this lady get these headaches? Where is [inaudible 00:05:20] coming from?” Genetics play a link, but many people I’ve seen get migraines that had no family relations, no one in their family at all had ever had migraines.

So I can tell you now folks, stress is one of the key big piles under it. It’s one of the supporting pillars for a migraine for many people. And once they get into that migraine and stay regularly, they stay in that state because the stress and the headaches become a stress and a headache, and it rolls on and on. So the diet needs to be sorted upfront. Talk to a nutritionist, or a naturopath, or your medical doctor, but go on a diet that excludes lots of stuff. If the pain’s bad enough, you’ll have no problem doing it because you don’t want that kind of pain. Okay?

Now some people say that coffee, black coffee, sometimes a shot, an espresso short can take your headache away like that. Worth a try, isn’t it? I’m just trying to think what else. Magnesium is one of the key minerals I usually give to people, and we could go as high as 1,000 or even 2,000 milligrams a day. So, that can work quite well too. It often pays for you to take that before you actually get the headache, and if you think you’re going to get it, is to load up on magnesium prior. You may want to try different forms of magnesium, because they can help to relax you quite a lot.

So let’s go back to my question. So yeah, prevention of migraines really comes down to the trigger. Trying to find out where your trigger comes from. Is it environmental? Is it chemical? Is it some chemical in the diet? Is it an emotional stress thing? As I said before, you need to become your own detective and try and work this out. There’s a good chance that you’ll find the trigger, particularly if you go through an elimination phase with your diet, you start eliminating foods. Remember, the foods you’re drawn to the most are the ones that give you the biggest problems. All right? It’s just like the people we love the most are the ones that give us the most amount of emotional grief.